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Everyone who’s heard ofKingdom Heartsis, usually, obsessed with it. The series is something of a rabbit hole, and once you step in you just never stop falling, the adrenaline of the drop never slowing. That sounds dramatic, but Kingdom Hearts really is quite an experience.
RELATED:Every Final Fantasy Character That Appeared In Kingdom Hearts
For example, why are there a bunch ofFinal Fantasycharacters running around interacting with Disney characters? And Sora and a bunch of other unique creations of the series are just sandwiched in between like glue. There’s actually a perfectly good reason for it all, if you may believe it.
How Kingdom Hearts Was Made
People talk about elevator pitches a lot, this idea of condensing your idea into a speech digestible and understandable in the length of an elevator ride.Series creator Tetsuya Nomura took the phrase literally.
After internal discussions about wanting to create characters rivalling Disney in popularity, Nomura took it upon himself topitch a literal Final Fantasy collaboration with Disney charactersafter finding himself in an elevator with a Disney executive.
From that, Kingdom Hearts was born. The series has grown exponentially since then,focussing more on its original characters than either Disney or Final Fantasy, though the pair themselves are what birthed the series. At this point, it’s impossible to deny the success of the series and the popularity of the unconventional combination.
The Prevalence of Final Fantasy In Kingdom Hearts
With Kingdom Hearts being created as a collaboration between Final Fantasy and Disney, it’s only fair for both of them to have pretty prominent roles in the games. ThoughDisney has stayed fairly consistent, providingworlds and characters for the games,the role of Final Fantasy has shifted greatly, and mainly diminished.
At its beginning,Final Fantasy provided much of the mechanics. Spells were named after those from Final Fantasy,Moogles appeared as save pointsand so on. In the original Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy characters even had a world of their own in Hollow Bastion.
As the games have gone on, the presence of Final Fantasy characters has dwindled, withnot a single one appearing in the base game of Kingdom Hearts 3. Nomura himself admitted that he didn’t know Final Fantasy characters were so beloved in the series, and added them back in the ReMind DLC for KH3 to help find Sora.
That said, the base combat elements have always remained, with familiar spells and adorable Moogles dotting every world of the games.
Which Final Fantasy Characters Appear In Kingdom Hearts?
With the knowledge of how important Final Fantasy is to Kingdom Hearts, it would be pretty nice to know how prominent they are too, right? Though they’ve started appearing less in each game,many characters have had major roles, while others have had smaller cameo roles.
There are some other smaller characters who appear as well, though they didn’t have major enough appearances in their original games to warrant a mention here.
